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WHAT IS HISTORY? 



ADDRESS OF 

PROFESSOR E. P. CHEYNEY, '83. C. 

BEFORE THE GRADUATE SCHOOL. 

October 3, 1907. 



(Reprinted from the Alumni Register^ University of Pennsylvania, 
Philadelphia, November, 1907.) 



Gift 
Tha University 



What IS History? 

Address of 

PROFESSOR E. P. CHEYNEY, "83 C. 

Before the Graduate School, October 3, 1907. 

What is history? Let us go to the Father of History and 
ask hini. Herodotus introduces his work by saying, "This is a 
publication of the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, in 
order that the actions of men may not be effaced by time, nor the 
great and wondrous deeds displayed both by Greeks and barba- 
rians deprived of renown, and why the Greeks and barbarians 
waged war on one another." 

His object, that is to say, is to recount the actions of men 
and the causes of them. It is true that the actions which he is 
to recount are only the great actions, and the men whose deeds 
are thought worthy of notice are only the great men. All 
the rest of mankind with all their doings are relegated to a 
dim and misty obscurity. Nevertheless, the main idea of Hero- 
dotus is clear. He does not want a good story to be lost and 
forgotten, therefore he will tell us what happened. He looks 
upon history simply as a tale of the doings of men. 

Other Greek and later historians have looked upon the 
matter differently. Thucydides says, "Perhaps the lack of won- 
derful stories in my work will make it less pleasing to my 
readers ; but it will be enough for me if it proves to be useful to 
those who want to have a clear knowledge of the past, and 
thereby of that which, according to the course of human events, 
will happen again." According to Thucydides, therefore, history 
is not merely a narrative, it should be useful. Polybius, like- 
wise, criticizing Herodotus, says, "It is not enough merely to 
describe the course of events, one must seek to understand the 
why and the wherefore of them, in order to draw instruction 
therefrom." A German historian of the seventeenth century says, 
"History is that which teaches the reader what things in life are 
useful and to be followed, or injurious and to be avoided." A 
modern English historian says, "History is a voice forever 
sounding across the centuries the law of right and wrong. ' 



That is to say, history, according to this view of the case, is 
meant to instruct. It should teach some lesson. The lesson may 
be a political one or a moral one or a religious one. But it is 
always history with a purpose, — its justification is ethical. 

Far and wide through historical writing can be f>and this 
ideal. Sometimes it is consciously and strongly held. There is a 
work in eight volumes in the University Library with the title, 
"The History of England on Christian Principles." Sometimes 
it is less consciously and clearly acknowledged, and yet the his- 
torian none the less tells his story under its influence. Macaulay 
is a devotee of the Whig party and is teaching its doctrines 
when he is writing his history of the seventeenth century as 
much as when he is speaking or voting in Parliament in the 
nineteenth. Froude uses his history of England to teach the 
evils of the Roman Catholic Church and to discredit Anglican 
clericalism, exactly as he uses any of his other forms of writing. 

The moral purpose of the historian often appears as a 
patriotic purpose. Bancroft wrote his history in such a way 
that Americans should think well of their country, much as 
Gilbert Stuart painted Washington in such a way that Amer- 
icans should feel universal admiration for the Father of his 
Country. Livy in writing the history of Rome is obviously 
trying to teach his readers devotion to it. 

Tliis patriotic sentiment is not only the most familiar form 
of history with a moral purpose, but it has lent much spirit and 
interest to historical writing. Green's "History of the English 
People" is permeated by a gentle and sincere patriotism that 
conciliates his readers and casts a glamour over the whole of 
English History. Thiers's admiration for Napoleon and devo- 
tion to France have infused a fire into his "Consulate and Em- 
pire" that have led to their constant republication in France and 
other countries. Treitschke and Syhel have given a genuine 
popular defense for the modern Prussian state in their great 
histories of Germany in the nineteenth century. 

Patriotic history, when mi.xed with certain other ingredients, 
forms excellent poetry. Kipling makes his two English children 
standing on a Sussex hillside learn their history from the fairy 
Puck as he points out to them its visible marks around them. 



See you tlie dimpled track that runs, 

All hollow through the wheat? 
O that was where they hauled the guns 

That smote King Philip's fleet. 

See you our little mill that clacks, 

So busy by the brook? 
She has ground her corn and paid her tax 

Ever since Domesday Book. 

See you our stilly woods of oak. 

And the dread ditch beside? 
O that was where the Saxons broke, 

On the day that Harold died. 
See you the windy levels spread 

About the gates of Rye? 
O that was where the Northmen tied. 

When Alfred's ships came by. 

See you our pastures wide and lone. 

Where the red oxen browse? 
O there was a City thronged and known. 

Ere London boasted a house. 
And see you, after rain, the trace 

Of mound and ditch and wall? 
O that was a Legion's camping-place, 

When Caesar sailed from Gaul. 

And see you marks that show and fade. 

Like shadows on the Downs? 
O they are the lines the Flint Men made. 

To guard their wondrous towns. 

Trackway and Camp and City lost, 

Salt marsh where now is corn, 
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease. 

And so was England born I 

How much of long-past and recently-past history is re- 
flected in the present poet-laureate's fine appeal of England to 
Ireland : 

Spouse whom my sword in the olden time won me, 

Winning me hatred more sharp than a sword — 
Mother of children who hiss at or shun me. 

Curse or revile me, and hold me abhorred — 
Heiress of anger that nothing assuages, 

Mad for the future and mad for the past — 
Daughter of all the implacable ages, 

Lo, let us turn and be lovers at last! 



Lovers wliom tragical sin hath made equal, 

One in transgression and one in remorse, 
Bonds may be severed, but what were the sequel ? 

Hardly shall amity come of divorce. 
Let tlie dead Past have a royal entombing. 

O'er it the future built white for a fane ! 
I that am haughty from much overcoming 

Sue to thee, supplicate — nay. is it vain? 

Hate and mistrust are the children of blindness, — 

Could we but see one another, 'twere well! 
Knowledge 'is sympathy, charity, kindness. 

Ignorance only is maker of hell. 
Could we but gaze for an hour, for a minute, 

Deep in each other's unfaltering eyes. 
Love were begun — for that look would begin it — 

Born in the flash of a mighty surprise. 

History no doubt can be written, has been frequently 
written, in prose as lofty as poetry, in such a way that certain 
moral or religious or political principles, broad and fundamental, 
or narrow and contentious, are brought out. In the vast mass 
of historical facts the historian will naturally find those that he 
seeks, and he may, if he will, arrange his materials and make 
moral reflections upon them in accordance with his beliefs and 
preconceptions. 

But this ideal costs its price. The historian under its influ- 
ence feels called upon to make ethical judgments of actions and 
of men, — defending or condemning historical personages and 
their actions. Men of the past are thought of as models to be 
followed or warnings of what is to be avoided, or at least as 
objects of admiration or dislike. This leads to the habit of 
ascribing extreme historical importance to the character and 
work of individuals and correspondingly little influence to the 
general conditions of the time or to the great mass of people. 
Good and bad motives can be ascribed to persons, not to the 
conditions of civilization that surround thetn ; certain named 
persons can be praised or blamed, the great unnamed masses 
cannot be. So the historian dilates on the psychological and 
moral characteristics of a few prominent individuals and sup- 
poses them to have had great freedoin of action and an un- 
bounded extent of influence. Motley's William of Orange, 



and Philip of Spain, Carlyle's Robespierre and Cromwell, 
Fronde's Henry VIII, Macaulay's William III, and a crowd 
of lesser heroes of lesser historians owe much of their conspicu- 
ous position in history to the admiration or condemnation of 
them in the mind of their historians; and history itself comes to 
be looked upon as the acts of a few great men using the rest of 
mankind simply as their instruments. 

But the greatest price we have to pay for this ethical atti- 
tude toward history is the intense subjectivity it gives to it. 
Everything comes to the reader as interpreted by the historian. 
Everything is seen through the medium of his personality. The 
facts of history when they are used to teach a moral lesson do 
not reach us in their entirety, nor grouped and generalized 
according to their internal relations, but selected and arranged 
according to the overmastering ideal in the mind of the his- 
torian. The reader is at the historian's mercy. The same set of 
facts, that is to say the history of the same country or period, 
comes to us as a Catholic, a Protestant or an Anglican history, 
according to the lesson that the historian wants to teach. We 
have histories of the French Revolution from the French, the 
English and the German, — from the republican and the royalist 
point of view. A certain series of events will appear entirely 
different, under this ideal, according as the person who recounts 
them is a rationalist or a devotee. We must balance Whig 
against Tory, Northerner against Southerner. The conflicts of 
the past are perpetuated by the very chroniclers who recount 
their history. Thus history sells its birthright of truth for a 
mess of the pottage of partisanship. If the function of history 
is to teach, it fulfils it but ill when the lesson to be drawn from 
it depends so largely on the interpreter. 

But let us turn to another ideal. We may find it also among 
the ancients. Phylarchus is described by a contemporary as 
"amazing his readers by a series of thrilling anecdotes," as, 
"studying dramatic propriety like a writer of tragedy." Livy 
speaks of the new historians of his time as believing that they 
can "by their skill in the art of writing improve on the rudeness 
of ancient writers." We have similar modern aphorisms. "His- 
tory should make the past live again." "A history should always 
be an epic." This is a literary or aesthetic ideal. Its choice of 



subject, its selection of material, its forms of arrangement and 
statement are dominated by literary, almost by artistic feeling. 
History is looked upon as a branch of literature. Just as the 
former view of history was that it should instruct, so this is 
that it should please. Daunou, in his Cours d'efudes hisforiqitcs, 
delivered at the College de France seventy-five or eighty years 
ago, brings out clearly this view of history. He advises the 
writer of history to read modern novels as examples. He says: 
"They will teach the method of giving an artistic pose to per- 
sons and events, of distributing details, of skilfully carrying on 
the thread of the narrative, of interrupting it, of resuming it, 
of sustaining the attention and provoking the curiosity of the 
reader." In as far as the historian is under this inlluence he 
feels the same intellectual elevation, the same creative activitv 
as the writer of a literary essay, a work of fiction, a poem. When 
Motley, for instance, in his "Rise of the Dutch Republic," de- 
scribes the scene at the punishment of Ghent by the Emperor 
Charles V; its civic officials in their black robes, the military 
bodies, the guildsmen thronging the hall and the populace crowd- 
ing the strcrts, his mind reverts to an<itlicr great epic scene where 

High on a throne of royal slate, which far 
Outshone the wealth of Ormuz or of Ind, 
Or where the gorgeous east with richest hand 
Showers on her kings harbaric pearls and gold, 
Satan e.xalted sat — 

and he closes his own description with the fine parody, "High 
on his throne, with the Queen Regent at his side, surrounded 
by princes, prelates and nobles, guarded by his archers and 
halberdiers, his crown on his head and his sceptre in his hand, 
the Emperor, exalted, sat." That is to say, Motley is writing In 
much the same spirit as Milton, though, of course, on a vastly 
lower poetic plane. 

Such an ideal leads to the selection of dramatic periods for 
treatment. Froude begins his history with the fall of Wolsey, 
v/hen the conllict between the English king and the Roman 
Catholic system was definitely joined, and announces that it is 
to extend to the death of Elizabeth. But when Mary, Queen 
of Scots, has been executed, when the Invincible Armada has 
been conquered, and the great contest lie has been describing 



seems to be settled, his dramatic sense tells him that the play, 
conceiving his period of English history as a play, is over. 
Therefore, as a draniatist rather than as a historian, he draws 
down the curtain, closes his book, and leaves the narrative of 
the last fifteen troubled, difficult and important years of the 
period he had announced untold. The military conquest of 
Mexico and Peru by brilliant Spanish conquistadores attracted 
its historian much earlier than the spread of civilized settlement 
and peaceful development over the interior of the United States. 
Periods of war have always attracted more historians than have 
periods of peace. 

This treatment gives to history the charm possessed by 
every work of art. Vigor, grace, color, life, flourish under the 
dominion of the literary spirit and thrive among literary asso- 
ciations. Macaulay's fine impressiveness, the picturesque de- 
lineations of Prescott and Irving, the grace and eloquence of 
the French historians of the early nineteenth century, are due 
for the most part to the prominence of the literary ideal in the 
minds of these writers. 

But accompanying these qualities and, unfortunately, 
almost always characterizing the literary treatment of history, is 
its weak hold on reality, its incautious use of its materials. In 
as far as a historian is influenced by this ideal, he is thinking, 
in reality, first of his reader, only secondarily of his facts. He 
is striving to produce an aesthetic effect, not to elucidate the 
past. Therefore he does not look narrowly at what he finds in 
his contemporary sources. He carelessly misinterprets them, he 
neglects much that is there but which is not suited to literary 
uses; he sometimes finds things that are not there at all. His 
creative imagination is apt to act like that of the poet: 

As imagination bodies forth 

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 

A local habitation and a name. 

Such tricks hnth strong imagination. 

The use of the imagination is an absolute necessity in all 
intellectual production, but it is also the most dangerous of all 
foes to clear and exact knowledge. We live in hereditary servi- 



tude to our imagination. Through a long line of descent it has 
possessed a supremacy against which the thoughtful man must 
struggle for intellectual freedom. This is a matter of evolution 
and is universal in its action. The bird or the rabbit that perceives 
a dark shadow passing over it, immediately sees or thinks it sees 
the spreading wings, the curved talons, and the hungry beak of 
the hawk swooping down on it, as it cowers close among the 
grass or leaves, although the shadow may be only that of a 
passing cloud. Primitive man must have learned to spring to 
shelter at many a harmless crackling among the bushes that 
nevertheless brought into his mind a picture of some hungry 
wild beast, or else we, his remote descendants, would not be here. 
And the brain that we have inherited from him has not forgotten 
its old trick of self-deception. We, like he did, live in a world 
of self-created ideas, only kept measurably close to reality by 
the most rigorous mental habits. The historian is subject to 
the common temptation ; so in the mind of Motley grows up the 
picture of an imaginary Philip II, a cruel, calculating, malev- 
olent being, sitting in his study at Madrid, holding the threads 
of a great conspiracy against the happiness and well-being of 
the people of half of Europe and all of America. So Livy and 
Tacitus and a crowd of other historians, like the poets and the 
moralists, look back to a purely imaginary early period of virtue 
and honor and unselfishness. So our historical traditions become 
full of extraordinarily good and extraordinarily bad people ; 
certain periods are described as pre-eminently happy and others 
as unspeakably miserable ; institutions are believed to have 
existed which would have been destructive to the human race ; 
historic shadows are apt to fall preternaturally dark and the 
lights to glow incredibly bright. Imagination plays a brilliant 
but a deceptive part in history. 

The borderland between history as a form of literature and 
historical fiction is a shifting and an uncertain one. Well on 
one side of the boundary we have fine constructive historical 
literature ; well on the other, we have admirable historical 
novels; but between the two there is a debatable land where 
outlaws continually dwell, — some of the "histories" of Thierry, 
Froude, and Thomas Watson, for instance ; some of the "novels" 
of Chateaubriand, Georg Ebers, and Miss Miihlbach and their 



congeners, — exiled from the more orderly regions on both sides 
by the critics, historical or literary, who represent established 
rule in both realms. 

There are still other historical ideals. One man, a phil- 
osopher, says that the proper object of history is the training 
of the time-concept ; that is to say, the life of a single man is so 
short that it is only by considering the life of the whole human 
race that we can get any adequate idea of the meaning of the 
expression "time." I am inclined to believe that more than one 
of my specialist colleagues in this faculty looks on history as a 
sort of background of general occurrences and conditions on 
which his special objects of interest are projected; a sort of 
Greek chorus to explain and comment, while the development 
of English or French or German literature, or mathematics, or 
political economy, or chemistry, or philosophy, occupies the 
center of the stage. And far be it from me to deny the name of 
history to any of the forms of writing we have discussed. His- 
tory is not a definite technical term, like geometry, or chemistry, 
or logic, or astronomy. It is a broad, general expression, more 
nearly analogous to the words "science" or "philosophy." In 
actual usage, even by historians, it connotes little more than the 
fact that the matters under consideration have occurred in the 
past, rather than in the present. There are not merely two forms, 
good history and bad history. There may be many types of 
reasonably good history. Nor is any one writer entirely under 
the domination of any one historical ideal ; several may exist 
coincidently in his mind ; he may at different times be influence.l 
more largely by one or another conception of his subject ; never- 
theless the fact remains that the ethical, the literary and the 
specialist's types of history that have now been reviewed have 
been ^nd are especially widespread and influential. 

i^/t want now to turn to another ideal, which looks at history 
from no one of these points of view ; which conceives of it 
neither as primarily intended to give instruction nor primarily to 
give pleasure ; which does not place it in the service of any other 
particular branch of knowledge, but allows it to exist for its own 
sake. According to this conception of history, the past is looked 
at simply, directly, objectively; it is conceived of as merely some- 
thing to be understood and explained. 



Just as a geologist studies the physical conformation of a 
country, its strata and its fossils, endeavors to understand and 
then to describe the conditions they indicate; just as the astron- 
omer makes his observations and investigations and reaches the 
results of his study; just as the student of any branch of knowl- 
edge approaches his subject, so the historian may approach the 
past of the human race, study what mankind has done and said 
and thought, strive to understand, strive to explain. He can 
look upon his subject as simply a body of facts, to be investi- 
gated and described for their own sakes ; not with a view of 
drawing a lesson from them, not with a view of praising or 
blaming any one, not with a view of so choosing and putting 
the facts as to give emotional pleasure to the reader, — not, in 
fact, with any ulterior purpose whatever ; but simply to take 
human history as his object of study, — just as one might take 
any other group of phenomena. 

This is the modern scholar's conception of history, as con- 
trasted with the ethical or the literary conception. It might be 
called the scientific method of treating history. The scientific 
method means nothing more than the simple method ; the direct 
approach to a subject, seeking knowledge for its own sake, 
without ulterior objects or ultimate expectations of any kind 
from it, using accurate methods of observation, logical pro- 
cesses of classification, trained powers of comprehension and 
explanation, — that is all that a scientific method means, — and it 
is just as applicable to history as to any other field of knowledge. 

Such an answer to the question, what is history? — such an 
historical ideal, has, like others, its own rewards and its own 
demands. It must not be supposed, in the first place, that such 
historical work is necessarily a thankless or an unappreciated 
task. More than fifty years ago a fellow-townsman of ours, 
Mr. Lea, took up the study of the history of mediaeval law and 
certain mediaeval and early modern institutions, especially those 
connected with the church. He is still at work in that field, and 
at this very moment, in all probability, his fine gray head is 
bending over the proof sheets of the fourth and final volume of 
his "History of the Spanish Inquisition." He had from the 
beginning an intense desire to know, and an open mind. He felt 
no attraction to polemical and secondary discussions, but went 



direct to the raw material from which all historical knowledge 
must be constructed. He has had means that have enabled him 
to gather in his own library a great body of such sources of 
history as are published, and to have many manuscripts copied 
from the libraries of Europe ; he has applied keen mental powers 
and, infinite industry and perseverance to these materials, and 
has given to the world just what he has found. This has been 
embodied in some fifteen volumes, which have been published 
from time to time during the half century of his labors. They 
are not, of course, popular history, and their titles are not such 
as to conciliate popular interest. Nevertheless many thousand 
copies and repeated editions have been printed, sold and read ; 
they are to be found in every public and many private libraries ; 
every scholar interested in the history of the Middle Ages knows 
and uses them ; every professor of history who teaches that 
period requires his students to read parts of them ; they have 
been translated into various languages, and they stand now a? 
representing the principal body of acquired knowledge in that 
portion of the history of the world. In many circles in many 
cities of Europe you might name over the list of Philadelphia's 
business men, lawyers and physicians, and find that not a name 
was recognized. The first gleam of recognition to give comfort 
to our local patriotism would come with the mention of Henry 
C. Lea. 

We might come still nearer home in our search for a test 
of appreciation of purely scholarly history. In our midst, I 
refer to the head of my own department, is one who, when 
American history was invariably written with one tendency or 
another, began the writing of it absolutely without partisan- 
ship ; who, when the romantic episodes of colonial days were 
familiar but the period since the Revolutionary War relatively 
unknown, began to tell the great story of our national exist- 
ence ; who, when the historical material used was only that found 
in statutes, legislative proceedings, public correspondence and 
other such official documents, examined and utilized all the 
sources for the knowledge of our past. With no special lesson 
to teach or philosophy to maintain, and only interested to find 
out and to understand and to explain, he entered on the survey 
of all the varied interests of our nation since we have been a 



nation, and in this spirit has written the "History of the People 
of the United States." It has become one of our "standard" his- 
tories. Some thirty thousand copies are spread through the 
community, to exercise with similar modern works a widespread 
influence. The history of our national period is now at least as 
well known as that of the colonial period, the times of peace 
have been raised in general estimation to at least as high a level 
of interest as those of war, the prevailing attitude toward the 
study of the first century of our national history is one of non- 
partisanship, there is no longer any body of historical material 
which is completely neglected. The influence of such work on 
methods of study has been even deeper than its addition to our 
knowledge. Now the mere post-graduate student of American 
History approaches his subject from a direction, and uses ma- 
terial that twenty-five years ago the veteran did not know. The 
very completeness with which the work has been accomplished is 
apt to blind us to its extent; but it cannot diminish the service 
performed by, or the honor due to, the pioneer who first hewed 
out a way for himself and for us. It is not therefore the admi- 
ration of a pupil for his teacher, it is not loyalty to a colleague, 
it is no mere attachment to a friend, that leads me to take as 
an example of not unappreciated and yet purely objective treat- 
ment of history, calm, impersonal, unprejudiced as to persons 
or as to parties, dominated by the single object of making clear 
the past, the work of Professor McMaster. 

Not only is scholarly historical work not unappreciated by 
others, it is a worthy work for the man who does it. It calls 
for all the mental powers with which he may be endowed. His- 
torical investigation is a work of infinite difficulty. Not only 
must the historian spend "laborious days and wakeful nights," 
but he must bring to his work ability and training. The ma- 
terial with which he has to work is enormous in amount, diffi- 
cult to collect, difficult to classify, difficult to interpret. The 
geologist, the chemist, the biologist, the student of literature, 
all make their own observations. The facts they work with are 
what they have themselves seen or can otherwise test by direct 
means. The historical facts with which we must deal come to 
us, for the most part, not through our own observations, but on 



13 

the testimony of men who once saw or heard them but are now 
long dead. We must weigh and measure their credibility, their 
opportunity and their ability to have observed correctly. Our 
facts often come to us clothed in dead languages and obscure 
terms. We must find out just what these mean. 

No power to put ourselves mentally into another's place 
can be too great for the historian's needs. We read the state- 
ments of a mediaeval or an ancient chronicler. He was a man 
of another age than our own, surrounded by institutions which 
have long since disappeared, ruled by ideas that are not our 
ideas, using the names of things that we have never seen. How 
shall we comprehend and interpret what he tells us? Here is 
the need for the historic imagination ; its normal use is in under- 
standing and interpreting the sources, not in writing the final 
draught of the narrative. 

No keenness of mental analysis is too great for historical 
uses. Historical facts are often the actions, the words, the very 
thoughts and motives of men, and we must make a psychological 
judgment of them. No moral powers, no breadth of sympathv, 
no capacity for entering into the feelings as well as the thoughts 
of other men comes amiss. For the scholarly historian must 
understand, and in a certain sense take part with both sides of 
all the controversies of the past. He must appreciate the horror 
of the orthodox for heresy and he must sympathize with the 
heretic who cannot accept the teachings of those in authoritv. 
He must enter into the slaveholder's point of view, and he must 
comprehend the antagonism to slavery of the abolitionist. He 
must rise above the controversial elements in these conflicts and 
see why each party felt as it did. This can only be done by 
adding to a knowledge of the circumstances a genuine sym- 
pathetic comprehension of the feelings or belief of each side. A 
certain largeness of view is requisite for a study which is con- 
cerned with the doings of all mankind and with the thoughts 
and feelings of all representatives of our race. 

No power over our glorious mother tongue can be spared 
by the scientific historian. Perfect clarity in stating the lesults 
of his investigations, the choice of the right word to represent 
every shade of human experience in the past, force to describe 
past conditions, and even eloquence to describe past events, all 



can be well utilized, so far as gifts or training put them into 
the possession of the historian. This, you may say, brings us 
back to history as a form of literature. Far from it. The 
question with which we have been concerned is of ideals, not of 
instruments. What I am now pleadin;:,'- for is literary power and 
effectiveness as a means, not ns an end ; as a tool in the hands 
of the scholarly historian, not as a final object to be sought for 
for its own sake. So long as our historical ideal remains the 
simple and accurate discovery and statement of what has occurred 
in the past, the use of all the resources of our language is noth- 
ing more than a wise utilization of all available means to that end. 
So there need be no fear that this historical ideal will not 
exercise all the powers that can be Iirought into its service. 
Moreover, it has its own e.xhilaration and charm. The scientific 
writer of history builds no Gothic cathedral, full of irregulari- 
ties and suggestiveness, aspiring arches, niches filled with sacred 
or grotesque figures, and aisles dim with religious light. — that 
is work for the literary historian. lUit he builds a classic tem- 
ple: simple, severe, symmetrical in its lines, surrounded by the 
clear, bright light of truth, pervaded by the spirit of modera- 
tion. Every historical fact is a stone hewn from the quarry of 
past records ; it must be solid and square and even-hued — an 
ascertained fact. Whether it is a deed, a word, a motive, a 
custom, a condition, — it must have really existed in the past. 
And whether the historian is describing the life of some person, 
or the history of some nation, a short period of time, or a single 
aspect of the history of some period, the discovery of a country, 
the foundation of a commonwealth, or the progress of a revo- 
lution, or it may be only the formation of some treaty, or the 
inception of some war — he is still a builder. He must examine 
all his materials ; he must know all the facts which can be ascer- 
tained concerning his subject; he must select those which are 
available for his purpose, those which really help to explain his 
subject; and then he must write his history, erect his structure, 
build his temple, with what skill he may. His design already 
exists, the events have actually occurred, the past has really 
been — his task is to approach as near to the design as he pos- 
sibly can. 



Such is the ideal of history, such is that answer to the ques- 
tion with which we began, that I should Hke to submit to you 
as the worthiest — the attitude toward history that it is simply a ^ 
body of material to be studied, understood and described, exactly 
as the biologist has his material, the chemist his, the mathe- 
matician his ; except that it is infinitely more complex, more diffi- 
cult, more fascinating than any. 

I would suggest that this view of history is especially 
suited to the purlieus of a great university, where each field of 
human knowledge and interest has its devotees, animated by 
just the same spirit, dominated by just the same ideal. I would 
suggest that it is especially suited to such a university as this, 
founded without political, religious or social bias ; nurtured in 
freedom from the control of any party or sect ; at no time failing 
entirely to hold up the standard of human culture for its own 
sake ; at the present time granting to its professors and students 
perfect liberty to investigate and declare the results of their 
investigations, to seek and to state the truth as they believe they 
have discovered it. I would suggest that this attitude toward 
history should especially appeal to post-graduate students. If 
an objective, direct, scientific habit of looking at one's work is 
once attained it is not easily lost. It will remain a solid founda- 
tion under the feet during all subsequent floods of reading, 
writing and controversy ; a man or woman who has once done a 
piece of scientific work that is absolutely impregnable to as- 
saults of criticism on its methods and its material, may after- 
ward safely add to his later work all the insight, all the powers 
of interpretation, all the excellences of language, that training 
and the experiences of life may bring to him. First critical 
study, then a scientific monograph, and then, if the fates allow, 
a great history. 

You may say that to take away from the writing of history 
ethical and patriotic and political teaching as objects, and to 
depose it from its position as a form of pure literature, is to 
give it too humble a role to play, that the scholarly historian is 
made too lowly and too meek in his claims. But remember the 
beatitude, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
earth." The earth ! What better inheritance could the his- 



i6 



torian wish ? The earth with all its ancient nations, with all its 
crowding memories, with all the story of the human race that has 
been lived upon it. The historian may not, like the poet or the 
philosopher, rise to the heavens or deal with the eternities, but 
he can well be satisfied to trace the fortunes of humanity, with 
its joys and sufferings, its conflicts, its failures, its attainments ; 
with all its keen interest, — because it is, after all, our common 
humanity. 



